This Thomas Nast cartoon celebrates an Independence Day victory of an American
crew from Monroe, Michigan,
Sho-wae-cae-mettes (nicknamed the "Shoes"), over their British rivals
at the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta in England.
In sixteenth-century England, betting on which passenger boat would
arrive first at its destination gave rise to organized competitions,
which were held annually from 1715. In England's American
colonies, whale boat races were held off the New England coast by the
1760s. Amateur rowing appeared in England, the United States,
Canada, and Australia in the early decades of the nineteenth
century. Oxford and Cambridge took up the sport in the 1820s,
first competing against each other in 1829 and organizing the Henley
Regatta a decade later.
In the 1830s through the 1850s, amateur rowing clubs formed in
American cities along the eastern seaboard, as well as in Pittsburgh,
Louisville, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Inspired
by the New York clubs, a group of Harvard students founded the first
college crew in 1844, and by 1850 several rowing clubs existed on the
campus. The sport was nearly banned in 1850, though, because of
rowdy behavior exhibited by a Harvard crew in the city of Boston.
In 1852, corporate sponsorship motivated organization of the first
intercollegiate athletic event in the United States, a rowing match in
which Harvard defeated Yale. In order to encourage rail travel to
the resort area of Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, the Boston,
Concord, and Montreal Railroad provided the college crews with an
all-expense-paid, two-week vacation in return for participating in the
resort's regatta.
The company promoted the event with bright red fliers and
advertisements of excursion train schedules. The crews were met at
the station by a brass band, and the spectators included Franklin
Pierce, the Democratic presidential nominee from New Hampshire, and
Josiah Abbot, justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The
spectacle received sparse news coverage, however, and the New York
Tribune predicted that intercollegiate sports would "make
little stir in the busy world."
Coverage of the Oxford-Cambridge races in the American press, which
disparaged physically weak American college students in contrast to the
ruggedly fit English crews, goaded a Harvard student to suggest an
intercollegiate regatta. In 1858, rowing clubs from Harvard, Yale,
Brown, and Trinity formed the College Regatta Association. In
1859, the first regatta was held on the Connecticut River before a crowd
of 15-20,000, and Harvard emerged victorious. Press
interest in the sport had grown so much since 1852 that the New York Herald
reported the results of the 1859 intercollegiate regatta as its lead
story.
Much of the public and press attention focused on the Harvard-Yale
rivalry since they were considered the nation's top
universities. It also became increasingly clear to college
administration, faculty, alumni, and students that press coverage of
the regattas brought additional attention to their schools, and
that the institutions' reputations were becoming intertwined with the
sport.
With Harvard's dominance of rowing, Yale hired William Wood to train
its crew, making him the first professional coach in American college
athletics. Wood put the crew on a strict health regimen and
introduced new rowing techniques. Under his direction, Yale
defeated Harvard for the first time in 1864 and became the premier
college team in the country. The Harvard-Yale competitions
continued until 1870 when an accusation that the Harvard crew had fouled
the Yale boat provoked fighting among the 15,000 spectators.
In 1869, the Harvard crew generated considerable publicity when it traveled
to England to compete against Oxford on the Thames River. The race
was telegraphed back by the new transatlantic cable. Although
Harvard lost by six seconds, it demonstrated that American rowers could
compete well against the more experienced British. It also inspired
the formation in 1871 of the first intercollegiate athletic association
in the United States, the Rowing Association of American
Colleges.
The original members of the Rowing Association were Harvard, Brown,
Bowdoin, and Massachusetts Agriculture College (later, the University of
Massachusetts). Yale, still upset over the previous year's
controversy with Harvard, refused to join. Massachusetts
Agricultural won the first regatta, provoking a Harvard student to
lament that the triumph of the "bucolics" over the
"intellectuals ... was a bitter pill to swallow." But it
encouraged other colleges to join the association, whose membership
continued to expand over the years.
During the 1870s, rowing reached the height of its popularity in the
United States and reigned as the major college sport in the East.
It was painter Thomas Eakin's 30 rowing pictures (1871-1874) that
introduced him to the art world. Tammany Hall politician John
Morrissey promoted his resort at Saratoga, New York, by sponsoring a
British-American contest in 1871 and the Rowing Association's regatta in
1874. The latter was attended by 30,000 spectators, including
President U. S. Grant, and was the centerpiece of weeklong social and
sporting activities. The winning Columbia University crew was met
at Union Station by a brass band and a parade to the campus.
For the Rowing Association's 1875 championship regatta, Harper's Weekly
and the New York Herald joined forces to construct a 30-foot
platform, on which they posted reporters and illustrators armed with
binoculars. Journalists from major newspapers telegraphed updates to
their cities, where people eagerly awaited the results. After Cornell
won the event, its president, Andrew White, proclaimed that money could
not buy the amount of publicity that the regatta freely generated for the
university.
In 1878, Harper's Weekly gave ample coverage to the Henley
Royal Regatta, particularly to the crew from Columbia University. The journal
profiled crew members, discussed their training, informed readers about
the history of the famed English regatta, and provided detailed accounts
of the race itself, along with illustrations and cartoons like the one
featured here. The Columbia team won the Visitors' Cup on July 5
after illness of a crew member forced the Sho-wae-cae-mettes to drop out
of the race.
Here, Nast honors the Shoes' first place finish from the previous day's event. Uncle Sam and the American Eagle appear well pleased with their international athletic success. On the heel of the shoe is the state seal and motto ("If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you") of Michigan, the home state of the Sho-wae-cae-mettes crew.
Robert C. Kennedy